I live in County Durham in the UK an area full of Roman remains, castles and old and new industry. I have been retired for about 2 years but am involved in a number of volunteer organisations including one encouraging young people to take a greater interest in science and engineering. I am also keen on supporting the local real ale industry.

In past jobs I have been mostly involved with the design, installation and maintenance of industrial electronic equipment. Some of this has been on specifying, installing and using bespoke software but I have little programming experience. Except in the mid 80s I had three staff reporting to me, each of whom provided me with a hand written weekly report. I had to take their reports, add my own comments and write out a report for my boss. This got very boring and in my spare time I wrote a text editor suite in basic. It meant my staff could write their reports and I could import them (7 inch floppies), produce a document with my comments and print off for my boss. It was very enjoyable task. Most of the software I was involved with was for production plant control and data logging but for a year I was part of a SAP implementation team.

Currently my interests lie in developing some very specific control software. I look forward to being involved with this forum and learning a lot.